Funded by:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 817737
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 817737
New ingredients fit for feed?
/in Ingredients & feed, News, Non classé /by admin5443In the search for new, sustainable fish feed ingredients, researchers are working to see if the ingredients can be used in feed technically.
Tor Andreas Samuelsen and colleagues at Nofima in Bergen have a number of advanced techniques in store. Samuelsen says it is underestimated how important it is that new ingredients being introduced to fish feed actually have the correct technical quality. Some ingredients require too much water, others require too high a temperature, while others disrupt the structural properties of the pellet – a bit like when you end up with a failed dough in your kitchen at home.
“If you cannot produce feed with high physical quality, it will crush into pieces before it reaches the fish, and the fish will not be able to eat it”, says Samuelsen.
He has a bag of tunicate meal in front of him on the table. Tunicate meal consists of dried and ground tunicates; a kind of sea squirt which feeds on microalgae in the sea. As part of the EU projects AQUABIOPRO-FIT (funded by BBI JU Horizon 2020) and FutureEUAqua (Horizon 2020) as well as the Swedish VINNOVA-funded project Marine Feed, the researchers have found that tunicate meal meets the nutritional requirements for ingredients that can replace some of the fish and soybean meal commonly used in feed. Tunicate meal is rich in the essential amino acids that fish need to build protein, but there’s still a work to be done to reduce its salt content. Samuelsen has tested the technical quality of tunicate meal and how much can be used in the feed.
Feed analysis with a CT scanner
Trial feeds were produced at the feed technology centre in Bergen. First, feed mixtures with different levels of tunicate meal were fed into an extruder, where the mixtures were cooked, kneaded, expanded and dried into pellets with a porous structure. The pores were then filled with rapeseed oil and then subjected to an oil leakage test.
Samuelsen used a CT scanner to examine the microstructure inside the pellet. A CT scanner is an advanced X-ray device which makes it possible to see the 3D structure without slicing the pellet.
“By studying the pellet’s inner structure, we gain a detailed understanding for example on how various ingredients affect the pore structure”, says Samuelsen.
The CT scan showed a large range in pore structure for pellets containing different amounts of tunicate meal. Photo: Gunhild Haustveit © Nofima.
The scan showed that feed pellets with a large percentage of tunicate meal had large pores. The pellet with the largest pores adsorbed the highest amount of oil, but also resulted in highest oil leakage.
Determining the maximum amount of tunicate meal
By running a mixture design experiment in the statistics program, he has set some quality requirements for the pellet when he adds tunicate meal to the feed:
“I want as much tunicate meal as possible in the feed mixture, but the pellet still needs to be of high physical quality and as porous as possible to make it adsorb the necessary quantities of oil. It also needs to have a high water stability.”
He found that 50% of the fish meal could be replaced by tunicate meal without compromising the physical quality of the feed.
Advanced tools
New ingredients that may be interesting to use in fish feed are constantly emerging. The work on tunicate meal is a nice example of how important it is to have advanced tools for studying ingredients and feed, says Samuelsen.
“We need to understand why ingredients differ from each other to be able to model the production process and physical properties of the feed before we start.”
Such new tools are now available through the Aquafeed Technology Centre (ATC) which is hosted by Nofima. This is part of the Norwegian roadmap for research infrastructure which is carried out in cooperation with Norce and the University of Bergen. ATC provides the industry with access to state-of-the-art laboratories and pilot-scale facilities to be able to meet the future needs of research, process and product development.
“ATC gives Nofima a unique opportunity to help the industry develop and characterize new, sustainable ingredients”, says Samuelsen.
This article was first published on nofima.no 27 October 2020.
FutureEUAqua and sustainable innovative tailor-made fish diets
/in Ingredients & feed, News /by admin5443Written by: Elena Mente, Katerina Kousoulaki, Ioannis Nengas
This article was first published on 11 April 2021 in the Feed & Additive Magazine
The ongoing positive growth trend of the aquaculture industry continues, reflecting the rising demand for healthy human food products. Availability of sustainable ingredients in fish feeds is crucial to maintain the increasing demand of the aquaculture industry and the consumers. In FutureEUAqua, resilient fish, efficient in utilizing sustainable innovative tailor-made diets are developed.
European aquaculture production has reached 1.3 million tonnes in volume with a value of over 4 billion euro (EU-28 member states). Of this amount, 4% is certified as organic, amounting in 2015 to a total of approximately 50,000 tonnes (Lembo and Mente, 2019). Nevertheless, significant bottlenecks present in organic farming need to be overcome in order to maintain this positive trend. In 2015, EU consumers spent 54 billion euro for buying fisheries and aquaculture products, reaching the highest amount ever recorded (EUMOFA, 2017).
However, Europe is still heavily dependent on external markets to cover this demand. Thus, EU aquaculture needs to increase the competitiveness of its products and respond to consumer demands for high-quality and safe food, in a challenging context of climate change, greater competition for natural resources, and conflicting interests for space and markets. To ensure food and nutrition security by 2030, the food production sectors have to sustainably expand in terms of space use, production and new value chains, exploring and enhancing innovation opportunities offered by sustainable and resilient aquaculture production systems, implementing the circular economy principles and increasing social acceptance of the corresponding activities and products.
Read the full article for free in the Feed & Additive magazine
Statement in support of the Commission’s plans to boost organic aquaculture
/in News /by admin5443Today, the European Commission published the much-anticipated Organic Action Plan. The FutureEUAqua project supports the Commission’s intentions to reinforce organic aquaculture in Europe.
In “Action 17”, the Commission lists important paths for reinforcing organic aquaculture from 2022. They are:
Starting in 2022, the Commission intends to:
FutureEUAqua’s project coordinator, Åsa Espmark, says that she welcomes and supports the initiative on behalf of the project consortium.
Links to the Organic Action Plan:
Get to know: Galaxidi Marine Farm
/in News, Partner introduction /by admin5443In the following partner interview, we asked Galaxidi Marine Farm to tell their story. Here is what they had to say.
Please introduce your company
Galaxidi Marine Farm (GMF), established in 1987 near the town of Galaxidi in Central Greece, stands amongst the oldest and most successful aquaculture companies in Greece. It is a vertically integrated company, operating two hatcheries (one of which dedicated to the production of organic seabass and seabream juveniles), six unit farms (one of which dedicated to organic production) and one state of the art packaging & processing station. The main species produced are Gilthead Seabream (Sparus aurata), European Seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) and Meagre (Argyrosomus regius) while continuous efforts to fully integrate new, promising species such as the Greater Amberjack (Seriola dumerili) are being made through the company’s participation in pioneering National and European funded programmes. Ninety-eight per cent (98%) of the company’s production is exported, to countries including Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Austria and more. In order to live up to the high-quality standards of its customers, the company holds a number of certifications regarding product quality, food safety, organic production etc (listed below).
EN ISO 9001:15 – EN ISO 22000:05 – BIO E.U. – BIO HELLAS E.U. – BIO NATURLAND:20 – GLOBALG.A.P.:19 – IFS FOOD:17 – ASC SSM:19 – MSC CoC:19 (ASC CoC) – FISH FROM GREECE:19
The company participates in a number of National and European funded programmes, and we, the people of the R&D department, are tasked with day-to-day management of those programmes, from financial reporting to coordinating and performing samplings. Our team consists of highly educated and continuously trained ichthyologists and biologists, ensuring the scientific integrity of the procedures. In addition to the State and European funded programmes, the R&D department is responsible for managing an in-house breeding program in collaboration with the Animal Breeding & Genomics Centre of the Institute Wageningen UR Livestock Research.
Importance of participating in Horizon 2020 projects?
The company from its early days displayed an orientation towards innovation, being pioneer in adopting new technologies such as AKVA automatic feeding system, Marel and Thema systems for fish weighing, grading and batching, Aqua manager software etc. Since the DIVERSIFY project (2013-2018), the company is actively pursuing its involvement in Horizon 2020 programmes as it acknowledges that investing in scientific research is pivotal for the development and adaptation of the industry.
Being a member of consortia such as those assembled at H2020 programmes, consisting of scientists renowned in their respective fields, and companies leading at a worldwide level, provides the company with the competitive edge as it is the end user to most of the outputs and innovations produced, be it novel aquafeeds, reproduction management techniques, monitoring systems and many more.
What are your main challenges and how can the project contribute to overcome these?
There are many challenges that the European aquaculture industry is facing and most of them apply to our company as well. Some of them are staying competitive at a global level, adapting as early as possible to the need for sustainably produced aquafeeds at the face of fragile aquatic ecosystems, responding to climate change, diversifying the production with integration of new species and products, staying up to date with the constant technological advances benefitting production, coping with availability of production space and more. FutureEuAqua addresses each of the aforementioned challenges, in dedicated Tasks and Subtasks of certain Work Packages.
Galaxidi Marine Farm (GMF) can benefit from consulting deliverables from all the WPs, but is even more involved and aware about the subjects of the WPs that is actively participating in. These are the development of novel, sustainable organic aquafeeds (WP2), that will suit its needs and perform equally or even better with even less environmental impact, and the development of innovative processing and packaging solutions (WP6), in order to increase the quality and shelf life of the final product.
Rapid evaluation of fish texture via system identification and modelling techniques
/in News /by admin5443The Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and the University of West Attica have focused on developing methodologies and tools for the non-destructive assessment of quality of fish products.
Specifically, this task involves:
Up to this point, a novel algorithmic operational framework for fish texture evaluation has been recently proposed and published*. This framework postulates a purposely-designed testing protocol applicable to fish products, which combines a vibration-like non-destructive loading of fish under assessment with detailed guidelines for analyzing the fish response data collected from testing.
The outcome allows for quantifying specific parameters related to springiness and viscoelasticity of fish flesh, which, in turn, translates into freshness assessment of tested fish. Published results show that definitive textural changes may be quantified between two fish batches stored in ice for different time intervals (1 and 5 days, respectively). Besides, further testing showed distinction between fish bought on the same day and stored for few hours in different temperatures. This is a promising indication that the same tool may be used for distinguishing among fish batches those exposed to abusive temperature conditions.
*D. Dimogianopoulos and K. Grigorakis, Effective algorithmic operational framework for fish texture evaluation in industry: Achieving maturity, Aquaculture and Fisheries, October 16, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aaf.2020.10.001
Figure: Detail of the prototype device during testing
British men more negative towards aquaculture, according to FutureEUAqua study
/in Consumer awareness, News /by admin5443Young men from the UK are more negative towards aquaculture, according to a recent consumer study conducted across five European countries. They were also among those with the least knowledge about aquaculture.
“Young people between the ages of 18 and 34 eat the least fish and have the most negative perceptions about aquaculture. Therefore, it is most interesting for us to reach this target group with more information,” says Pirjo Honkanen. She is the director for market research at Nofima, the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture research.
2500 randomly selected people from the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France and Germany answered an online survey last year. This autumn, another 500 people from each of the five countries will be surveyed to assess whether information campaigns in social media affect the level of knowledge.
“Sustainability is the focus of the entire project. Producers are investing in order to make seafood production more sustainable, and then there is the question of whether consumers are aware of this and acknowledge it. It will be very exciting to check whether the knowledge, attention and acceptance of aquaculture increases during this project”, says Pirjo Honkanen.
Information campaign
The consumer study is part of the project called FutureEUAqua, where research is conducted on everything from genetics, feed development, process development and packaging, to consumer studies. FutureEUAqua receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme.
An aim of the project is to increase the knowledge and awareness of how seafood production takes place, especially fish farming. The results from the consumer study will therefore input to an information campaign directed at European citizens.
“We asked the respondents to rank where they would prefer to receive such messages, and in what form. Based on the answers we received, we are going to concentrate our communication around social media, especially Instagram and Twitter,” says senior researcher Themis Altintzoglou.
Four methods
European citizens will, for instance, learn about four methods of aquaculture:
The project will develop campaigns in the form of short videos that will be posted on social media in the different countries. The posts will guide the audience to a website containing more information.
“Our goal is to be more transparent about the topic and inform, not to sell. The website will present easy-to-read and understandable information based on research from the project. In addition, they will also be able to access the more detailed reports. We hope to inspire the consumer to seek more knowledge about the subject,” says Themis Altintzoglou.
This article was first published on Nofima.no